The Colour of Love
by AriannahHayle
Summary: Ariannah, who has grown up in a Psychiatric ward, has a warped sense of the world and love. Enter Sebastian - can he save her?
1. Chapter 1

It's funny, staring out of this window. Just this simple gesture symbolises how lost I am in the world. I was only seeing through barred windows the fresh air so alien to me.

I had always known that I was different. I realised that when I was around 5, when I set my wardrobe on fire. My parents thought I had gone insane, because I was sitting inside it.

I never meant for that to happen, I had only wanted to feel the flames, breathe in the heat, just forget everything and let the pain fill me up. I never meant to scare anyone. I ended up spending the next two years in Archwood Mental Institution. They were the start of 7 lonely years. When I was first admitted aged 5, I was the youngest person to have ever been admitted into that Institution, they held constant tests on me, and I had to be kept under 24 hour surveillance.

At first all the doctors and nurses were really kind and nice to me, but when I started to be awkward, uncooperative, and difficult. They increasingly locked me into my room, or as I came to call it – my cell. I got used to seeing the white walls and the clean crisp sheets instead of my bedroom. I didn't feel like myself in hospital, I felt like I was losing me, drowning in the whiteness and disinfectant, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was just another patient, not a person who had feelings.

My parents did come and see me, almost constantly for the start but when it became clear that I was going to be spending along time in the institution and I wasn't normal there visits became shorter and less frequent.

I knew they didn't want me. They didn't want a freak for a daughter. They didn't want people to know about me. They saw me as black mark on pristine white paper. The worst thing to deal with was the fact that when they told me on the hospital phone that they would come and visit me at a certain date, I believed them. I would sit and wait for them the whole day, until it registered that they wouldn't come.

I was rejected, and no longer important. They didn't want me. Up until then according to my doctors I had been improving. When I was allowed to go home one weekend, my mother declined- saying she didn't want me in the house because she thought I was going to harm my 3 month old baby brother.

It was then that I realised how naïve I had been, thinking that my family cared about me, I was a freak, harmful, dangerous. They didn't want anything to do with me.

A few months later, they moved away to the other side of the country.

When I was 7, I got moved to West-Ridge Institution. I hated it there. They were so inconsiderate of my feelings and my age. They liked to use physical punishment on me, when I did not obey, or was difficult. One time the beating was so bad, I ended up with severe internal beating, my crime- asking my nurse for a toy.

Not one doctor or nurse realised that I was hurting inside and that I couldn't control my outbursts, and when I did have them I didn't mean them. They also didn't realise that if they had treated me with a little respect and gave me some time, I would have improved. When I was at West-Ridge one time, this nurse was being so malicious and cruel to this small boy about 3, I couldn't help it – I just lifted my hands and somehow pushed her out of a 7 storey building. I didn't kill her but I seriously hurt her. I never meant to. I was just so angry. All I could feel was the rejection of my parents, the cruelty from the nurses, abandonment and loneliness.

After that, I got moved into a secure compound – It was like a prison. I didn't understand what had happened to me, why wasn't I normal. I never saw another child, apart from that boy that one time. What was wrong with me- i wondered? I frequently at the compound became suicidal. I wanted to die, and live again – have a right life, not the one I had. When I was 8 I tried to commit suicide 5 times in 3 months. I hated myself even more after the last attempt because I couldn't even succeed in dying.

It was then that they started giving me pills, and keeping me sedated. I was much easier to handle like that, because they couldn't have me successfully dying at the compound – their reputation would have been in tatters.

All I remember is floating in and out of conscious, only to see a nurse press another injection into my arm.

I didn't see black when I closed my eyes. I saw colours; pretty colours, playful colours, harmful colours, and dangerous colours. I was subject to where theses colours would lead me, to dreams of my home and my room, or to the feeling of abandonment sitting alone in a black room, and the only light slowly flickering out.

The colours were kind but cruel, sweet and back-stabbing. They lulled me in with a poisoned sweet. They were always a Catch 22.

"They hovered, strangling my mind, within blind delusions. They destroyed any joy I held on to, as I became deluded. They plunged me within my vial grave, as I crumbled I faded. Stenches of death overwhelmed, I twisted within my grave.  
>Bones of my flesh protruded, I rotted within my delusional fate."<p> 


	2. Chapter 2

It was only when the officials came around, when I had been sedated for about 2 years,-not constantly, but sometimes for long periods, when they decided to really put a priority on my schooling, up until then no-one really cared, I could read – I read a lot – it was the only thing sometimes at those places that kept me sane, and I could write, but that was about it. I could do nothing else – no maths or science. I didn't know how to draw or play an instrument, I was 14.

That was when my life started to pick up. I had this teacher/tutor called Sebastian Faraday. He had sandy brown hair, and violet eyes. He wore glasses and converse. He was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. When he walked into my hospital room I thought he was an angel.

When he smiled at me, I melted. He walked so gracefully and kissed my hand. His voice was the smoothest velvet silk.

It was when he walked out of the room, when I realised that I had no chance with him. I was a delusional teenage girl, who was going insane, had bright red hair, which was lanky and unwashed and emerald green eyes, which were tired and lifeless. My body was slim and battered. My pale arms held cuts from a razor. Where I had tried to release all the pain I was feeling.

"She paints a pretty picture  
>but this picture has a twist<br>you see… her paintbrush is a razor  
>and her canvas is her wrist<br>she paints her pretty picture  
>in a colour that's blood red<br>while using her sharp paintbrush"

I was never going to be good enough for this guy. I was the eternal darkness and he was the summer sun.

The evening after I had met "the angel" I asked a nurse who he was. She told me that he was going to be my tutor. I asked her why. She told me that he had been brought in by the C.E.O. to teach me because the guidelines for schooling teenagers in psychiatric wards had changed. I had to be brought up to standard. He was going to tutor me from 8 till 7.

I didn't know what to think. I was so astounded. I had no one in my life for years, almost constantly with me like this teacher was going to have to be. I felt so nervous. What if I screw up? What if he doesn't like me? What if I have an episode in front of him?

I had to go and lie down on my bed and wait for the sick feeling in my stomach to go away. I was on the fourth lap of the colours so it must have been a while because I heard someone coming into give me my food.

I opened my eyes and as soon as my eyes rested on the food I felt sick, they had mixed all the colours up. And it was all uneven. I couldn't eat it. I did have the small cup of tea they gave me.

That night was one of the longest I had spent tossing and turning in bed. I didn't sleep at all that night, so when the nurse came to "wake me" I was having an episode.

I thought that there was a person in my room, standing at my bed. He was holding a knife, he was calling me in. He wanted me to kill the bunny rabbit he had tied up – it was crying and wriggling. He wanted me to end its life.

I then had the urge to cut. Cut anything. My hair, my clothes, my skin, I wanted to cut, I wanted to destroy everything, myself included into oblivion. I started scratching at my wrists. I was going insane. When the nurse tried to calm me down, I lashed out at her, hitting her straight in the stomach.

I don't remember what happened next. The last thing that I remember was that I was lying in the middle of the room, with 4 big male nurses restraining me, and Sebastian Faraday was walking into the room.

I remember waking up, in the lockdown, the serious ward. You had to have been really dangerous, suicidal to end up here. You didn't just walk into the ward, they had iris scanning on the door to enter, and there was CCTV everywhere in the ward and was watched 24/7.

I had spent quite a few months in there so I knew all the rules. It was a shock waking up there though, I thought I was past all this, I was supposed to be getting better. What happened? I at that felt point felt so low, and so suicidal I almost didn't care that Sebastian Faraday walked in.

"Hey" He said.

"Oh, Hi"

"I am Sebastian Faraday"

"Alaska"

"No second name?" He enquired?

"No, I disowned my family years ago?"

"Oh, really?"

"Well Alaska isn't my real name, it was Alie"

"Why did you change it?"

"Because It wasn't my name, it was something my parents chose – I wanted something to represent me"

"I chose my own name as well"

He somehow managed to teach me how to play the piano, and the guitar. He taught me how to feel the music, and how to pour my emotions into the chords and the keys. He managed to show me that I had a way of releasing all the emotions that I had bottled up in me without having to slash my skin open just to get the release, and the relief of not being so wound up.

He read poetry and Shakespeare to me. He read them with such passion and feeling I was hooked. They were another way to escape my life.

He showed me how to make my life worth living. He showed me how locked my existence was, and he handed me the key. He gave me something to live for – music, poetry and him.

I started to write my own poetry. It was something to fill in the long bleak time sitting alone in my room, waiting.

"I never saw a thing, till I closed my eyes

I never knew anything till I lost my mind".

He whispered secrets to me, made me dream of faraway lands, dream of a future where I could be free, and travel around the world. He made me believe, that anything was possible. He made me feel normal, like a normal teenage giving me experiences.

He helped me to create a bucket list – all the things I wanted to do before I died.

Have one day in a normal high school.

See the northern lights in Iceland.

Go to London.

Do a road trip around the US

Feed a baby penguin

Learn how to swim.

He spell that he cast over me, made me constantly miss him whenever he wasn't around.


End file.
